Nearline

Capacity enterprise, or nearline HDDs are a mainstay for inexpensive, reliable bulk storage, utilized by nearly all enterprise market segments, including servers, network or external storage and hyperscale or could service providers. For as long as TRENDFOCUS has been tracking these shipments (as far back as 2008), nearline HDD unit volumes have increased from 3 […]

Just recently, there was a white paper authored by Google staff titled “Disks for Data Centers”. In it, the authors called for a new HDD form factor that meets five key criteria. In summary, the paper questions the current HDD form factor and how changing some key dimensions could result in a “better” HDD for […]

Disk supply has been a point of concern for a couple years now, and despite stalling overall HDD volumes, disk demand is projected to rise. The nearline HDD market is the main reason behind surging volumes given the high disk count per nearline HDD. Currently, all nearline HDDs are aluminum based, and in our view, […]